What is the Kádár cube and what does it have to do with construction industry advertisements?
Everyone has seen a Kádár cube: in the 1960s and 70s, these square, mostly single-story, gabled family houses were built by the dozen in small towns and villages. Their popularity stemmed from the simple design, the scarcity of resources leading to a limited selection of cheap materials, and the possibility of building them in a communal way with the involvement of neighbors and colleagues.
I'm not revealing a big secret: most domestic construction industry advertisements are just like this! They are simple, boring, and stuck in the last century.
The Golden Circle
The English author and motivational speaker Simon Oliver Sinek in his highly successful TED talk clearly explains the Golden Circle model. To achieve success, three simple questions must be asked: What? How? Why?
The essence of the communication diagram lies in the fact that it does not prioritize the product, but the added value that convinces the consumer to put the offered goods into their shopping cart.
Let's face it, a construction material is everything but a „sexy” product, it can never become a „love brand”, for the following reasons:
- It is needed quite rarely – perhaps 1-2 times in life when we are building – and even then, the influencing factor is more important, which can be the professional or parents/friends, and nowadays, influencers have also come into play. In this sector, recommendations and others' opinions take precedence… (WOM)
- Most construction materials are not as visually striking as an interior design accessory (e.g., a curtain, carpet, or furniture). Of course, IKEA did not achieve love brand status just for this reason…
- Building or renovating is one of the most challenging activities for people and relationships.
A marketer who wants to succeed with empathy in such a rigid market environment must really pull up their socks. They are true jugglers, navigating between gaining consumer sympathy, very conservative, humorless professional players, and company management, who only care about selling the product and profit. And we haven't even mentioned that after formulating the task, a creative agency enters the equation, which must translate these expectations and feelings into an appropriate concept…
The Catch-22
The advertising professional strives to visually present some kind of golden mean in advertisements that emotionally and professionally captures the interest of buyers. I would go further, perhaps injecting some humor into the entire communication, which alleviates the stress factor of the building process, calming the mountain of problems facing the builder.
This may be the only element that a construction industry advertisement definitely does not contain, because brand owners fear becoming ridiculous in the market, conveying the wrong message to the target audience.
Ultimately, management cannot let go of its own taste, is afraid to think outside the box. This is how conventional, spoon-fed, „cube” advertisements are born (with respect to exceptions). Most advertisements aim for a safety play: they are not „daring” enough, cannot stand out from the clichés used by competitors, and the message gets swallowed up by the enormous advertising noise bombarding the consumer.
Eighteen years ago (!) as a young beginner in marketing, I encountered for the first and last time a completely novel advertisement at my current company, which aimed to break away from the usual happy family and product combo projected onto us.
The essence of the message was to break the traditional mindset that in our country, houses can only be built from bricks, because that is the tradition, our parents and grandparents also built from it, so it must be the best choice.
The advertisement failed; the message did not resonate with the consumers. The timing was not right; society had not yet been absorbed by the digital world, and the smartphone was not our most important accessory.
However, another company excellently rode the wave of the mass spread of smartphones ten years later, at the right time, and introduced its „smart” product to the public across all platforms. I should add that the focus was still on the product, but the message was presented so cleverly that from then on, everyone who wanted to build only sought the „smart brick” at the building material stores.
Can anything be sold with emotions?
Buoyed by success, every manufacturer in the sector churned out infinitely monotonous and unimaginative presentations based on the idealized family model.
I do not mean to say that these are not good advertisements, as they meet every consumer expectation: there is empathy, emotion, desire creation, the warmth of home, everything. And is that enough?
A frequently voiced criticism is that Hungarian advertisements are so commercial because consumers do not like to think; they won't understand if the message is more complex, so why struggle, let's strive for the simplicity of a wooden nail. The happy family is pleased because the product is good for them, you see? But what about those customers who, for some reason, do not live in such circumstances, do not desire a family, or think about real estate as an investment?
What came first, the chicken or the egg?
Is the need for a message of wooden nail simplicity, a concept built on happiness, because the buyer can identify with it the easiest, or have we (the advertising industry) conditioned consumers to accept this, like it or not, this is it, be satisfied with it?
Construction advertisements are made worldwide, and I do not think that the foreign target audience is smarter than the domestic one. Here are a few examples of how this can be done differently – the family and the wall-caressing child are not necessarily the only emotional factors that can evoke emotions from the buyer.
It is true that as a marketer, I see the world a bit differently than other people, but I still believe and would expect every advertisement to convey value, provoke thought, ignite my imagination; otherwise, I just stare blankly like a brain-dead person.
I hope we will get here someday.
